Topix Media Lab
Topix Media Lab has now been recognized for two years in a row as one of five fastest growing U.S. Book publishers.
View Rights PortalTopix Media Lab has now been recognized for two years in a row as one of five fastest growing U.S. Book publishers.
View Rights PortalThe labour movement in Lebanon: Power on hold narrates the history of the Lebanese labour movement from the early twentieth century to today. Bou Khater demonstrates that trade unionism in the country has largely been a failure, for reasons including state interference, tactical co-optation, and the strategic use of sectarianism by an oligarchic elite, together with the structural weakness of a service-based laissez-faire economy. Drawing on a vast body of Arabic-language primary sources and difficult-to-access archives, the book's conclusions are significant not only for trade unionism, but also for new forms of workers' organisations and social movements in Lebanon and beyond. The Lebanese case study presented here holds significant implications for the wider Arab world and for comparative studies of labour. This authoritative history of the labour movement in Lebanon is vital reading for scholars of trade unionism, Lebanese politics, and political economy.
Land and labour provides the first full-length history of the Potters' Emigration Society, the controversial trade union scheme designed to solve the problems of surplus labour by changing workers into farmers on land acquired in frontier Wisconsin. The book is based on intensive research into British and American newspapers, passenger lists, census, manuscript, and genealogical sources. After tracing the scheme's industrial origins and founding in the Potteries, it examines the migration and settlement process, expansion to other trades and areas, and finally the circumstances that led to its demise in 1851. Despite the Society's failure, the history offers unique insight into working-class dreams of landed independence in the American West and into the complex and contingent character of nineteenth-century emigration.
Hired seasonal labour forms a significant part of the agricultural workforce in many countries. Key topics covered in this book include: changes in the hired farm workforce; area studies, and community impacts and responses; and the need for community services.
An illuminating look at the world of cleanfluencers that asks why the burden of housework still falls on women. Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is beautiful. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women's work. Social media is flooded with images of the perfect home. TikTok and Instagram 'cleanfluencers' produce endless photos and videos of women cleaning, tidying and putting things right. Figures such as Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch have placed housework, with its promise of a life of love and contentment, at the centre of self-care and positive thinking. And yet housework remains one of the world's most unequal institutions. Women, especially poorer women and women of colour, do most low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. In The return of the housewife, Emma Casey asks why these inequalities matter and why they persist after a century of dramatic advances in women's rights. She offers a powerful call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the 'naturally competent' woman homemaker.
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. It contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy. It will be read in universities by social scientists and anthropologists and also by those with an interest in maritime Scotland.
This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.
Available in paperback for the first time, this book is the third in the three volume set The Labour governments 1964-1970 and concentrates on Britain's economic policy under the Labour governments in the 1960s. It assesses the origins, development and outcomes of the attempts made by the 1964-1970 Labourgovernments under Harold Wilson to modernise the British economy. This is the first comprehensive and archivally-based work to offer a detailed study of this modernisation project. The book places the project in the context of Labour's economic ideas as they had developed since the 1940s as well as the economic legacy they inherited from the previous thirteen years of Conservative rule. After outlining this context and providing a summary narrative of economic policy over this period, the international aspect of Labour's approach to the economy is analysed. The core of the book then goes on to look in detail at the policies directly concerned with modernisation. Following the agenda set by the national plan of 1965, policies on planning, investment and the firm, technical change, the labour market and the nationalised industries are all analysed. In addition, the productivity campaign of the late 1960s is shown to have encapsulated many of the underlying ideas but also many of the problems of Labour's approach to economic policy. The final section of the book asks how the pursuit of modernisation affected Labour's pursuit of "social justice", before offering an overall assessment of Labour's period of office. The book will be of special interest to contemporary historians, economic historians and those interested in the history of the Labour party. Together with the other books in the series, on domestic policy and international policy, it provides a complete picture of the development of Britain under the premiership of Harold Wilson. ;
Spanning a period which stretches from the 19th century to the present day, this book takes a novel look at the British labour movement by examining the interaction between trade unions, the Labour Party, other parties and groups of the Left, and the wider working class, to highlight the dialectic nature of these relationships, marked by consensus and dissention. It shows that, although perceived as a source of weakness, those inner conflicts have also been a source of creative tension, at times generating significant breakthroughs. The book brings together labour historians and political scientists who provide a range of case studies as well as more wide-ranging assessments of recent trends in labour organising. It will therefore be of interest to academics and students of history and politics, as well as to practitioners, in the British Isles and beyond.
With the emergence of neo-liberalism in the 1980s as the dominant domestic and international political-economic orthodoxy, labour as both a social category and political movement tended to be written off or ignored by academics, politicians and commentators. However, at a time when the world's working class is growing faster than at any previous time in history and neo-liberalism is widely challenged, this orthodoxy is clearly inadequate. The spread of global production means that to ignore labour, its organisations, interests and politics, is to ignore one of the key components of that process. Labour organisations have not gone away and neither has the state: their relationship remains as significant as ever. The strategic relationship between trade unions and social movements, nationally and internationally, has also developed markedly, especially in the south. New patterns of resistance are emerging to challenge global capital and those who assert that globalisation is irresistible. ;
This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, it makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. The book offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in both countries than suggested by 'traditionalists' and 'revisionists' alike. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars in history and politics and all those interested in and concerned with the past, present and future of Labour politics in Britain, Australia and more generally.
This book offers a new critical framework for understanding the processes of politicising and gendering care for older people and their manifestations in several European contexts. It interrogates how care for older adults varies across time and place while searching for an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy in different countries and at various societal and political levels. It brings together multidisciplinary contributions that examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services and family care. The contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels.